That's the spirit.

Setbacks make us mentally stronger.

Cultivate virtue: a feeling for truth, a love of truth. Truth does not feel good or bad, pleasurable or painful, it simply feels true: something in you knows it is right, despite the difficulties it poses, the questions it asks.

Shy away from difficulty and you'll get nowhere.

summon your whole being into a single mass of doubt

Hone the spirit with discipline.

if you don’t cut off the mind-road, you live a ghost’s life, clinging to weeds and trees

Depression is the end result of head overruling heart.

Why meditate? To calm the emotions and empower the spirit.

the invisible … is so close and immanent that we cannot gain the distance from it that vision or observation would require

Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not random, but bound up with the phenomena—they are derived from the nature of the phenomena, from two characteristics of the same: External/Internal.

Legs should hug the Earth rather than project a ramping ego.

Light draws out the sight but blunts the other senses. That's why I prefer night, especially for work.

Fear has become a social responsibility.

polish the good and correct the bad

 

You can't go all out to win. You have to master the technique of detecting winning chances based on the flow of the bout. And the only way to acquire that ability is through sheer devotion to training.

The teacher, if he's worth his salt, wakes up your spirit. Then, if you're worth your salt, you use that spirit to rouse the slumbering dragon inside. Thereby you come to make a difference.

It is good to learn to go without.

the hidden stillness … at the core of struggle

In the heat of battle, when consumed by spirit, it's that background strength – the fruit of practice – that makes all the difference.

 

What is it that makes the work 'spiritual' rather than self-serving? Humility, humility, humility.

a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance

The more you bleed in practice the less you'll bleed in the fight.

Every love contains a promise.

To become braver put yourself into situations where you're scared. 

To become stronger search out situations where you're weak.

 

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but a lifetime to prove it.

Stout of heart. Courage literally means all heart.

Meditation reveals that the subject of ones thoughts is always oneself, particularly ones issues: trauma, prejudice, opinion. When the mind is cleared of these then it is naturally quiet.

The student/teacher relationship is a bond which cannot be broken. It is honoured and kept alive through practice.

Wonder is the very engine of life.

 

Make small waves in your heart 

and be conscious of those waves.

When the teacher speaks, the good student is dumb-struck. This is because they listen.

It is good to learn to do without.

Practise listening and slowly it will become healing.

questioning empowers being

 

When, after twelve years or so of Taiji, I announced to my teacher that I had finally started to feel energy he just snarled: Welcome to the human race!

It is the very job of the ego to be blind to the soul.

Happiness is not the result of forgetting but of fully remembering.

a gesture of deepness

Trying to turn lead into gold is nothing compared to taking something mechanical like an instrument – a string and a bow – and using it to evoke a human soul, preserved through the centuries.

 

Head suspended from above, sacrum dropping like a stone, and the heart lifts naturally as it would in worship.

The dantien is pretty much where the womb is. This means that each of us starts our existence enveloped and nurtured in dantien energy. Such energy is natural to us.

It takes years of meditation for the fug to lift – no time to lose. Without clean air not only is it impossible to see or think clearly, it's also impossible to simply be.

Strange that those who have it laid on a plate tend to be the most bitter.

Aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art – the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art.

 

humility, courage, faith and discipline

Truth is neither agreeable nor disagreeable. Truth disturbs – knocks you for six. Stops the mind and rends the heart.

To love someone is not just a strong feeling … it is a promise.

The work polishes the window to the world. Then internal and external become one – unified in a shimmer of grace and spirit.

Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

 

No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

If we have to think then we will be slow, too slow. We train to respond instinctively, immediately, without thought.

When spirit is present everything is sacred.

Taiji is all about relationship: connexion.

Civilisation is what happens when you domesticate spirit. Life is robbed of energy and cluttered with things.

 

Shrug it off, whatever it is.

Subtract the self and you will find spirit.

It is all a ceaseless concatenation of associations.

The good student is haunted most of all not by what the teacher taught but by what the teacher failed to teach, by what was omitted.

the difficult bottleneck of silence

 

Yielding is not getting out of the way. Yielding is drawing the Other in, drawing close.

The teacher sees something in you that you don't see yourself. You vaguely feel something, some difference, something unique, something wanting to express, but it's the teacher (coupled with the practice he provides) that lifts the fog and slowly allows you to make deeper sense of yourself.

You are a guest of nature – behave.

Spirit and Soul: the Yang and the Yin of the Internal.

The fundamental root of speech is prayer

Spirit is the spark that gets life going, that makes life alive.

Subversive to the point of perverse.

A journey fuelled by the desire for truth.

The teaching – transmission – lends a sense of direction to the journey.

The work becomes internal when the mind stops.

To be just heirs we have to recognize the symbolic debt that binds us to our origin.

It's difficult (impossible) without a partner.

Give me love and work – these two only.

Spirit is the devil. The devil in the detail, in the difference, in the other. The unaccountable, the unknowable, the unconscious. Life is the marriage of heaven and hell.

the painful solitude of the journey

 

The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.

Partner work teaches you to see yourself the way someone else sees you – to stop being so locked up in your own inner world – to enter the actual physical and energetic world around you as full participant rather than self-engrossed subject.

Peasants (people who work with the earth) have natural roots whereas the educated middle-class have poor roots because they never get their hands dirty – they work more with their minds and their fingers (keyboards) – heads in the clouds rather than feet on/in the ground.

Falling to pieces.

faith as a function of patience

 

Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.

Practice and you'll get somewhere; don't and you won't.

Taiji is not really about learning new things as much as it is about unlearning old things. Letting go of the past, the dear old past. There is something unbearably poignant about this: sad, tearful, heart-wrenching. Good practice leaves one emotionally blasted, torn asunder, blindly groping for a stone under which to crawl. Emptiness is the heaviest burden to bear.

Much of what the teacher reveals you will not comprehend — will not be ready for – so it must be stored away for a later time. The only way of getting ready – of becoming strong enough – is through practice.

nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution

 

The longer the work endures the more taxing it becomes. Especially the inevitable pendulum swings. One cannot venture into the unknown for glimpses of insight without paying a price. A heavy price.

relieved to hear the unpleasant truth rather than a pleasant lie

Civilisation necessarily robs us of spirit and wildness. It effectively domesticates us. It does this by infecting us with fear. Fear of communism, of Islam, of viruses. But most of all, fear of ourselves, fear of who we really are beneath the plastic, civilised veneer. Fear of what's bubbling away in that terrible place called the Unconscious.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Relaxed hips allow connexion to the ground. Relaxed shoulders allow connexion to the Other. Relaxed eyes allow connexion to Spirit. It's all about connexion.

 

the tonality of our emotions

Outside the box. It's a relatively simple matter to slip outside the box made for you, but exiting the one made by you is more tricky.

never mind what comes to mind

Mastery is in little things.